Today's answer may change tomorrow. India, China Ireland, Malaysia and the Philippines top current offshore investment sites. Mexico, the Czech Republic and Poland also get plenty of votes. But which locations are slipping, and who might be sneaking up to take their place?

U.S.-based multinational companies are continually adjusting as their markets move offshore. Soon, the rest of the world will be a bigger market than the United States — a fact that compels companies to regard foreign investment as a survival strategy.

Moreover, foreign investment is no longer a matter of seeking cheap labor to produce low-cost goods. It's about being closer to local manufacturers whose end products are locally built and consumed in huge quantities. It's about getting to know exactly what's selling well regionally, and developing appropriate software and applications to make proprietary technologies indispensable to local markets.

For many large semiconductor manufacturers, foreign investment is also about lowering the cost of ownership on the next multibillion-dollar fab through tax benefits and grants from foreign governments. It may mean transferring a crack R&D staff overseas or or sourcing the best engineering talent from the local market — or both.

When a company is determining where it wants to sink its foreign investment, "the only factor to consider is the access to engineers," said Malcolm Penn, chief executive officer of market research firm Future Horizons. If the cost of hiring and keeping an engineer locally happens to be cheaper, "it's a double bonus," he said.

But blindly following a list of popular destinations — especially one based largely on cheap labor — is a dubious recipe for offshore success.

Earlier this year, McKinsey Global Institute warned in its report "The Emerging Global Labor Market" that if U.S. and U.K. companies continue to concentrate their activities in India, China and the Philippines, and if current rates of offshoring persist, the demand for engineers from these countries will "fully absorb the suitable supply by 2011."

Translation: If you are just entering the foreign investment fray and are not Intel or Microsoft, the engineering talent in your chosen country is not likely to be abundant or cheap — or the best.

Investment bets
EE Times' list of hot spots for global investment includes alternative locales worth considering. Candidate countries are divided into three categories: sure things, good bets and sleepers.

Before picking a spot and shifting operations, companies must prioritize the jobs they'll need to do overseas. Then they can rank the candidate countries according to cost criteria.

No one country can fit all needs, so EE Times' list of global investment hot spots is by no means universal. It is instead a tool to help companies assess prime and alternative locations.

Batam
Consider one of our sleepers, the Indonesian island of Batam. The region pitches itself as the focal point of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations — a low-cost, hassle-free alternative to places like Shenzhen, China. It's worth a look.